


The Only Way Out is Through

by scioscribe



Category: The Cabin in the Woods
Genre: Crack, Friendship, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Unicorns, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-16
Updated: 2012-04-16
Packaged: 2017-11-03 19:23:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As long as the rest of the world is dying, you might as well hitch a ride on a unicorn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Way Out is Through

**1.**

Marty stayed with Dana until she died.

Then she gasped, coughed, and sprouted two inches of fur in sideburns. When she opened her eyes again, they were yellowish-green.

“Wow,” Marty said. “Even a girl who’s pure in heart and says her prayers at night.”

“I think I’m a werewolf,” Dana said, and Marty sighed, because why was it that only stoners watched classic cinema anymore?

He leaned back. There were tears still standing in his eyes from when she had stopped breathing, and he had the vague idea that if he were really, really careful not to blink, they would crystallize there and it would be a sign that he really had only destroyed the world as a matter of principle, not just because he didn’t love anyone in it enough to die for them. Through the shimmer, he watched Dana lick her long, sharp teeth. Her tongue was gray and pink with black splotches.

Marty blinked, and Dana licked the tears off his face.

“I didn’t think we had that kind of relationship,” he said.

She told him, “You taste like salt. And weed.”

“Self-explanatory.”

“And fudge pudding,” she said. She bounded up, first onto all fours, and then, more self-consciously, more wobblingly, onto just her feet. “I think I’m all better now.” She pulled her shirt around and looked at wide silvery scars that were bloody gashes a second ago, claw-marks and teeth-marks, and smiled her wolfish grin at them. “See? Let’s go.”

“Um, checklist?” Marty said. “It’s the end of the world. And you’re a werewolf. I really kind of think we should stay put. Aren’t you going to go all _argh_ and start killing people?”

In the dim light of the room, her new eyes were the color of lemonade and lightning.

She said, “Who else is there for me to kill but you?”

**2.**

Dana ran forward through the halls, dropping down on her hands to lope along, her joints popping all out of position, when she was far enough ahead of him. Marty said, “No, no, you go be a werewolf, I’ll just—stumble along, slowly bleeding to death,” but she came back with a pack of gauze in her mouth.

“You have hands, you know,” he said, but he took it anyway, and together they patched him up. Wherever the blood was crusted too thick, Dana just nibbled and licked at it delicately until it was clean. When he fixed the bandage, his hands were shaking, and he couldn’t look at her, because his blood was smeared all around her mouth like chocolate syrup. “This is fun. Post-apocalyptic fun, with werewolves and blood-eating. I love it. We should have done it sooner.”

“If I bit you,” she said, “you’d be a lot stronger.”

“If you bit me,” Marty said, “I’d be a werewolf. And I was really holding out for sexy vampire.”

“They’re probably around,” she said. She wasn’t Dana anymore. Dana only bought eggs from cage-free chickens; she looked away when people got shot in the movies; she had almost killed him to save the world. Dana was like the skim milk version of a superhero, all innocence and hard decisions. The werewolf had killed her, and then he had, by not letting her kill him, and now she had his blood on her teeth and in the fur around her face, and she didn’t seem to care that the world above them was smoke and sirens and the thundering footsteps of the Great Cthulu or whatever. He probably shouldn’t call her Dana anymore, but he was too tired and still a little too high to come up with anything else. Besides, it let him pretend that he wasn’t lonely.

She was looking at him curiously, head tilted to one side.

“Forget it,” he said.

“I’m going to eat,” she said, dropping down again. Her spine fell into position with all the clamor of a bowl of Rice Krispies, but she didn’t even wince. Slobber dripped from her mouth onto the floor. “Do you want anything?”

“Can you _cook_ it?”

“No,” she said. Her heels were getting higher, buckling out as the shape of her feet changed. “But I can kill it.”

“Pass,” Marty said, slumping against the wall, but when she came back, she had fresh blood on her and a lazy, sated grin. She spat a pack of beef jerky out at his feet.

“They have vending machines,” she said. “I broke one. You have to eat.”

“And why is that, exactly?”

“Because you wanted to live,” she said. “That’s why we’re here.”

He ate the beef jerky slowly.

“Meat’s good,” Dana said encouragingly, scratching her belly now with her foot. Once he could have built a whole library of fantasies on her ability to be that flexible, but now it just let him see that she was growing a stump of a tail. It was the same reddish brown fur that was on her face. Well, at least she matched. Fashionable. He dropped the plastic wrapper down on the floor, since the whole question of saving the planet had pretty much gone out the window. Dana snuffled at it and then left it alone, disinterested in its smell.

“You should just go,” he said. “You’re always going to be faster.”

“I thought about that,” she said. “I have an idea.”

 

**3.**

There were golf karts everywhere, most of them with the keys left in. Some of them with the keys _and_ the bodies left in.

They stole the unicorn instead.

“You do remember that we watched this gore a man to death, right? Just gave him a second, really deep bellybutton, about the size of my fist? And he didn’t just bleed rainbows and Lisa Frank pencils, but, like, actual blood?”

“I remember,” Dana said. She growled at the unicorn, which pawed the ground in response. “It’ll let me get close.”

“Um, _why_ exactly? Horses and wolves are not exactly simpatico. You’re not a werecowboy.”

“I’m the Virgin,” Dana said simply.

She came closer. The unicorn held its ground and then, just as Dana was about to brush up against its lowered head, made a whickering sound and rubbed its nose against her. Dana petted the unicorn in long, careful strokes. For a second, she looked like herself again, but maybe that was just because he had always pictured Dana as the kind of girl who was good with horses and household pets and small woodland creatures. Snow White. She said, “He feels like velvet. Come closer.”

“Thanks for calling, but I’m not interested in your product at this time,” Marty said, but he edged closer anyway. The unicorn gave him a sideways glace but let him approach.

“He knows you’re with me,” Dana said confidently. “Let him smell your hand.”

Marty let the unicorn smell his hand, because, really, why not?

The unicorn did not bite his fingers off, but he still seemed more interested in Dana. It took half an hour for Dana to convince him to try boosting himself up, without a saddle or reins or a single logical premise, onto the unicorn’s back, whereupon it promptly threw him off and scoffed at him. Then it took another half hour for him to get back on and stay there, although the unicorn kept turning his head back and giving Marty incredulous glances. His eyes were normal-colored except for the pupils, which of course contained tiny rainbows, except every now and then one of them would spin around like a slot machine and show a star or a heart instead.

“His eyes are magically delicious,” Marty said.

“I noticed that. Weird, right?” the werewolf said. “By the way, he says his name is Starlight Destroyer III.”

Marty fell off the unicorn again.

“You can talk to unicorns?”

“Could I not do that before?” she asked, frowning. Then a zombie shambled by and she ripped its throat out with her teeth and spat a mouthful of arteries and flesh onto the ground. “Tastes dead. Come on.”

So that was how Dana, Marty, and Starlight Destroyer III left the facility.

**4.**

The way Dana explained her plan to him was that there was a lot of world out there, and it would take the ancient gods time to destroy all of it. In the meantime, she was a werewolf, he had a unicorn, and the air smelled like blood and meat and fire.

They might as well live.


End file.
